Developing a Global Vision
UNIQLO stresses their idea of becoming the world's number one casual clothing brand and one way to achieve this is to establish a profitable overseas business.
Like most businesses, UNIQLO has business targets. They target countries like the United States, Japan, Korea, China and the UK. Even though, in the UK and China, they are not doing as well as they want to, in Hong Kong and South Korea, they are doing better than they thought they would. As for the US, they find it a bit of a challenge but a lot of other retailing companies are finding it challenging as well.
To have an outstanding business overseas, they must do several things. For one thing, they have to change their global mindset. A lot of their people think that their Japanese operations are separate from their overseas businesses and they need to lose that mindset and think of themselves as one business with many stores worldwide. Another thing is that they need to replicate their key success factors. They essentially sell the same sizes and products in their Japan stores with success and so they replicate it in their overseas stores. They were successful in their customer services in their Japan stores and they need to stop struggling in their overseas stores and replicate their successful customer service. Another thing they need to work on is getting more local staff to the top. A lot of their top managers are from their Japan store that moved to the other stores to help out and even though they are great at what they do, they're not as fitting with the needs of the overseas customers than someone who is local to that country. Therefore, having a local staff at the top would help them become a better overseas business.
In order to get their name known, they needed to build a flagship store and they did so by opening a flagship store in SOHO New York in Autumn 2006 that displayed all their best products. They are looking forward to opening more stores in the various fashion capitals.
Source: UNIQLO
